AMD had several sessions discussing Mantle.
AMD APU13: Mantle Shooting for 100K Draws per Frame : Read more
AMD APU13: Mantle Shooting for 100K Draws per Frame : Read more
SourceAndersson took the concepts for a new low-level API and approached AMD, Intel, and Nvidia with the software, with the goal to have a company evangelise it and eventually turn it into a software standard. Only AMD was eager to adopt it and eventually called it Mantle to tie into their reveal for the Volcanic Islands family of GPUs.
[/quotemsg]So its implied it wasn't something AMD had originally sought out to do, it was definitely something they jumped on when the idea rose that the other 2 didn't go after at the time.
This might help, but DirectX is more than just Direct3D, Valve is trying to bridge that gap however.I feels AMD Mantle API open the door to Linux gaming. The only weak point of Linux over Windows is the lack of M$ DirectX support.
He added that it's "not unrealistic that you'd get 20% additional GPU performance" with Mantle.
On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps.